Gender education

One of the main pillars of SWV is women’s awareness and empowerment.In order to fulfill this mission SWV pays great attention to the educational factor. Since the first day of its foundation, the organization has organized plenty of non formal trainings for women and girls aimed at raising the awareness about gender equality and women's rights. The main goal of these trainings is to empower and strengthen skills of young girl and women, to break the stereotypes, as well as to increase the knowledge about prevention and overcoming of domestic and gender-based violence. However, SWV does not limit itself to only non-formal education. Considering the gender education as a basis for domestic violence prevention, SWV has taken measure to ensure gender education becomes a formal aspect of school curricula in the Republic of Armenia and includes subjects relating to gender equality.As a means of promoting this activity, SWV along with National Institute of Education, developed and published a theoretical and practical guide "Man and Woman, Different but Equal", which will be given to all schools in the Republic of Armenia.

16 days of activism against gender-based violence is coming to its end, but it lacked a single State announcement which would show the State’s support for the struggle against violence and discrimination. Yet since 2011 the RA Government has adopted the National Action Plan to Combat Gender-Based Violence, as well as Strategic Action Plan for 2011-2015 which aims at promoting the reduction of gender-based violence.

The Action Plan, adopted 4 years ago, is quite ambitious and Armenia should have registered a serious progress in reducing gender-based violence in case it was completely implemented. We spoke to Armenuhi Tanashyan, the head of the Women’s Affairs Department of the RA Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, to understand to what extend and how the Action Plan was implemented.